This IQ is devoted to the continuing economic crisis and its political manifestations.
1. Marxists and Communists have always seen austerity/wage repression policies as:
a. A policy to restore economic stability:
b. An opportunity to mobilize the working class to make socialist revolutions;
c. An excuse to denounce liberals and social democrats;
d. the standard policy of capitalists to make workers pay for capitalist crisis by increasing the rate of profit.
2. Many Marxists and Communists see fact that most European social democratic parties have accepted and continue to accept some version of the austerity/wage repression program supports the view that
a. Austerity/wage repression is in the interests of the working class;
b. Austerity/wage repression is a social democratic program;
c. That social democratic parties have adopted a neo-liberal outlook much like the Democratic Party in the U.S.
d. Austerity is inevitable.
3. In the United States,particularly, Marxists and Communists see the immediate causes of the ongoing economic crisis as the result of:
a. Nearly 70 years of wasteful multi-trillion dollar military spending;
b. Nearly 40 years of government tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy;
c. Nearly 40 years of government “deregulation” of finance and industry;
d. All of the above.
4. Marxists and Communists see the best hope to end the crisis in the interests of the working class is:
a. A Third World war which would produce socialist revolutions to end capitalism;
b. The strengthening of the IMF and World Bank to bail out economies;
c. The repeal of all of the policies mentioned in question 3, and their replacement with policies to restructure debt and raise mass purchasing power by raising wages and restoring social welfare protections.
d. Support of the Trump administration’s connection of protectionism and with the policies mentioned in question four to “make America great again.”
5. Increasing numbers of people in the U.S. and through the world have come to see the Trump administration as increasingly posing a danger of neo-fascism because of:
a. Trump’s overt racist and xenophobic incitements;
b. Trump’s attempts to expand military and police power outside the rule of law;
c. Trump’s attempts to foster a leader cult around himself and make loyalty to him the embodiment of the nation.
d. All of the above.